Saints, snooker and Ed Sheeran: Sheffield Wednesday's boy wonder is a reminder of what football is about

He smiles with a charming naivety, stifling a laugh in what is his first pre-match media press conference. "That's a massive question!" he splutters. "I suppose so, I've been here since the age of eight or nine, so I suppose for players and maybe their parents who look at it and wonder whether they should put everything into an academy or if that works. So far I've been one of those that can do it and get to where you want to be."

It's the sort of generous answer you come to expect from a youngster who plays with the sense of exuberance displayed in a 24-minute call that takes in topics from his footballer father to the instructions that have been handed to him by manager Danny Röhl in what was a fast-tracked route to the front of the Owls forward pack. At the very heart of this good news story is a West Yorkshire kid for whom all this is a whirlwind of new. The big questions can come later.

Where the more senior members of the Wednesday changing room wile their free hours playing golf, fishing or spending time with young families, 18-year-old Cadamarteri plays snooker with his mates. Bradford-based, he picked up a love for the sport having spent time in the glow of Sheffield's rich cueing tradition and counts Ronnie O'Sullivan and Judd Trump among his heroes. A highest break of '70 or 80' at such a tender age shows his sporting prowess has leaked far beyond Saturdays battling Championship defenders in the rain.

He battles them hard. Watching Cadamarteri go about his business at weekends, it's perhaps easy to forget there is a fresh-of-face young lad down there doing his thing, young enough to be pushed into the back seat of his old man's car on a family trip to London and who spends the evening of matches scrolling back through footage of his goals on social media in his bedroom. He had never heard of Boney M before Wednesday fans started looping his manager's chant but admits it's 'catchy' and sometimes finds himself humming the tune around the house the day after games. Meadowhall trips, he said, have become a little more problematic, though he admitted he quite likes the attention for now at least.

For all the VAR shouting and the Super League squabbling and the transfer window head-banging that goes on in football, it is in some ways the wide-eyed excitement of someone like Cadamarteri that brings us back to the essence of what football is about; young lads running about trying to score a goal.

"It a great feeling, indescribable," he said when asked on the feeling of scoring a senior goal in front of big, passionate crowds. "It's something I'll look back on my whole career, scoring 'this goal' against 'this team', thinking about what I could have done better, what I did well. It's great.

"I thrive off hard work, I thrive off running and running, that's my game. I feel like at every level it's always been hard work playing up front because that's my game anyway, but especially under this manager everything is intense, intense, intense. It just makes me work harder and put myself in good stead to play to the standard he wants."

Cadamarteri is the little brother of the team, a young man who spent time gazing over at the likes of Barry Bannan and Liam Palmer at Middlewood Road while bursting through the Wednesday ranks on adjacent training pitches. Now he calls them teammates. There's a sense it's a little surreal but that he's taking it in his stride.

"There's a lot of the team that have welcomed me, all of them," he said. "They've all been great. The lads that have really helped me progress are the strikers and they've all had such good careers; Michael Smith, Lee Gregory, Ashley Fletcher. They've all done so much at different clubs and are they're able to help me with my positioning, bits and bobs with my finishing and the natural striker's instinct.

"You look back on the years where you're over there training on the astroturf and they're all walking into the same place I walk into now. You think about the progress you've made over the years. It's completely different when you move into the first team environment because you train with different people, you're in different groups. You get to know everyone and people have put their arm around me and helped me."

Wednesday travel to Southampton this weekend aiming to put a puncture in a Saints' unbeaten record that stretches back to September, when Cadamarteri was still kicking around the Owls second string and when most of us thought a Röhl was merely what East Yorkshire folk called a breadcake.

The St Marys experience holds good and uneasy memories for the 18-year-old; a classy goal in an FA Youth Cup upset, a first trip with the first team as 19th man last season. With that maiden senior voyage, however, came the dreaded initiation song. He went for Ed Sheeran and claims he held his own, though he admits he is '100 per cent' a better footballer than a singer.

On the man of the match Youth Cup effort that unbelievably came over two years ago, broadcast live on YouTube and sparking excitement from the watching masses back in Sheffield, he grins at the memory. Cadamarteri was the headline-maker in an exciting team led by Andy Holdsworth. Also in that side were the likes of Joey Phuthi and Rio Shipston, both of whom have featured in first team quads in recent weeks as part of Röhl's mission to accelerate youth into the mix.

"It was a great day and a good game to be a part of," Cadamarteri said. "What made it such a good game to be a part of was how close-knit our team was, we had a really good team at that stage with good potential and good players. I'll be honest, we never saw ourselves losing that game and it was the same in the other rounds, we could go 1-0 down and we knew we could turn the game around and win. I've got quite a few lads that I'm still mates with and a few that aren't at the club anymore. I keep in touch with all those lads.

"It's a ground with good memories for me and I don't see why we can't go down there and take all three points. They're a good side that play good football but with we're a good side and with the run that we're on I feel like there's no reason we can't go down there and take points from them."

They may well do so with a snooker-playing, Ed Sheeran-warbling, back-of-the-car perching teenager at the front of their push. Whatever comes from this weekend's south coast sojourn, it feels like Wednesday have unearthed a good one in the grounded, boyish and hard-working Bailey Cadamarteri.